The rise of oxygen is one of the biggest puzzle in Earth's history. Our planet's atmosphere started out oxygen-free. Then, around 3.5 billion years ago, tiny microbes called cyanobacteria (or blue-green algae) learned out ...

Scientists from the Magma and Volcanoes Laboratory (CNRS) and the European Synchrotron, the ESRF, have recreated the extreme conditions 600 to 2900 km below the Earth's surface to investigate the melting of basalt in the ...

A rock the size of a small city hurtles towards Earth, smashing a crater bigger than the span between Washington, D.C. and New York City. The heat and shockwave raises the temperature of the atmosphere above boiling as huge ...

Floods of molten lava may sound like the stuff of apocalyptic theorists, but history is littered with evidence of such past events where vast lava outpourings originating deep in the Earth accompany the breakup of continents.

(Phys.org) —"I have always been interested in the origins of plate tectonics," said Philip Skemer, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in ...

(Phys.org) —Massive terrestrial planets, called "super-Earths," are known to be common in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Now a Northwestern University astrophysicist and a University of Chicago geophysicist report the odds ...